An unknown shared existence

Mukul Sharma, Jan 19, 2009, 11.54pm IST

According to a statement by The Centre for the Study of Science and Religion, sciences respond to a felt need to understand the world, and religions respond to a felt need for the world to have meaning.

From these different starting points, one issue emerges at the junction of any science and any religion — namely, are these felt needs commensurate? That is, is the universe a moral place, so that the natural order is relevant to human lives and values? Do faith and family, love and charity mirror any larger meaning than the meanings we give to them?

Today, to a first approximation, the answer to these questions from any religion is Yes, and the answer from any science is No.

There it is then: the absolute inalienable divide between belief and knowledge where faith, family, love and charity turn out to have nothing in common with facts, formulae, laws and chance. However, if we were to consider the quintessence of the entire above statement as the embedded question: "Is the universe a moral place?" and replace it with: "Is reality a knowable occurrence?" they could start sharing something after all.

Two areas of human endeavour — micro and macro studies — serve this purpose well because while one deals with the deep inside, the other delves into the deep outside.

The deep inside goes deeper than just molecules and atoms; it reaches subatomic distances, then entities that make up subatomic particles and finally those that make them up till even the vanishingly small is breached at Planck length which some physicists sometimes humorously refer to as "God's unit" since it remains independent of human existence, measurement or scaling and is defined as the smallest distance or size about which anything can be known.

The deep outside goes beyond the solar system, galaxy, galactic superclusters, dark matter, the universe and out of the entire known cosmos into an ultimate unknown order comprising extra dimensions, many worlds and multiverses of which, again, nothing can ever be known.

This leads to the conclusion that belief and knowledge — religion and science — occupy a fragile middle zone of the knowable where things like time, causation, identity and free will make temporary sense. Yet science and religion both say their systems do or can transcend even the unknowable. Perhaps, only this sharing of hubris or ignorance can some day be their common salvation.